These seven deadly domestic problems have three things in common. First, inept politicians and bureaucrats have consistently worked on the wrong problem. They have put political agendas and political pandering ahead of what's best for the people.

Much has been written about the fact that we do not have a health-care crisis in America; we have a health-care cost crisis. The recently passed health-care deform legislation does not address the real problem, nor will it bring down the deficit as we have been falsely told. The right steps to solve the right problem have also been written about extensively, but those steps would get in the way of the all-out power grab we are seeing from this administration and the Democrats in Congress.

Congress is about to pass financial reform legislation, which will also be another "deform" bill because it establishes another unneeded oversight bureaucracy to oversee all financial institutions, except Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One would think that the two entities that were the catalyst for the financial meltdown more than a year ago would be included in any so-called reform legislation even if the new bureaucracy is un-needed. But we are not supposed to think.

Secondly, these same politicians provide lip service to the least informed voters who usually continue to re-elect them, while they let the problems grow for decades. The Social Security and Medicare systems are in desperate need of modernization. This could start with the novel idea of just using payroll taxes for their originally intended purpose of providing benefits, but legislation introduced by Senator Tom Coburn a few years ago to do that failed with 85 votes against.

And thirdly, we know how to solve all of these problems, but we do not have the leadership or political courage in Washington, DC, to solve them. Instead, problems go unsolved, or we get incremental band-aids and, worse yet, more problems are created. The exponential increase in the national debt is simply irresponsibility on steroids! Collectively, these seven deadly unsolved problems have us headed for the same type of economic and social turmoil we are seeing in Greece. It's just a matter of time, and there is no "sugar daddy" to bail Uncle Sam out.

State and local government are frantically scrambling to meet budget shortfalls as high unemployment and shaky consumer confidence mean less income tax and smaller sales tax revenue for government coffers. At the same time, falling home prices and rising foreclosures will start to hit municipalities hard this year as all those property reassessments done over the past 18 months kick in.

A couple of municipalities, such as Los Angeles and Detroit, have even whispered the "B" word. Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan argued in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that the city will likely have little choice but to declare bankruptcy between now and 2014. Also, several smaller markets, such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Jefferson County, Alabama, have openly talked about filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy - a reorganization available only to municipalities.

Market experts say they're keeping a particularly sharp eye on Detroit and Los Angeles, as well as markets that were hit hard by the boom-and-bust housing meltdown, such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami, Jacksonville, Orlando and Orange County. Cohen says many investors believe that if such a doom-and-gloom scenario becomes reality, the federal government will step in. "I think there is a complacency mentality that if something big happens, well, the government will bail us out," says Cohen.

Greece has been saved and the euro stabilized. Both undertakings were vital - and the right thing to do. But the two packages - the first worth 110 billion euros and the second valued at 750 billion euros - have also spread a feeling of unease. Experts have voiced doubts as to the packages' efficiency, politicians have become pensive and the public is downright concerned. Indeed, some have even gone so far as to begin doubting the validity of the European project in its entirety.

But the crisis has presented us with an opportunity as well - and it is one that politicians must not let pass them by. It is time for the European Union to be established anew - we need a new foundation and a new justification. Otherwise, European integration, which has progressed so rapidly in recent years, could come to a screeching halt, or even be reversed. For far too long, the project has been in the hands of the elites and the diplomats - the public has largely been shut out.

When the European Union was founded, Europeans were full of idealism and enthusiasm as they fought for a peaceful, united continent. What remains of this fascination? Not enough, unfortunately.

"A state of public emergency, limited to the parishes of Kingston and St Andrew, has been declared and will come into effect at 6:00 pm (2300 GMT) today," the government's Jamaica Information Service (JIS) said. The limited emergency in the popular Caribbean tourist destination covered districts of the capital where gunmen on Sunday fired on two police stations and set fire to another. At least one policemen was injured.

The attackers were suspected supporters of Christopher "Dudus" Coke whom the government has called on to surrender to face a US extradition request on cocaine trafficking and gun-running charges. Streets into the poor Tivoli Gardens area of West Kingston, where Coke is believed to be hiding, were barricaded on Sunday in defiance of a police call for Coke to hand himself over, witnesses said.

The US Department of State has issued a travel alert warning its citizens of the possibility of violence in Jamaica's Kingston Metropolitan area. Tensions in Jamaica rose over the last week after Prime Minister Bruce Golding announced he was starting proceedings to extradite Coke. US prosecutors describe Coke as the leader of the infamous "Shower Posse" that murdered hundreds of people during the cocaine wars of the 1980s.

The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon's ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world's computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland. The creation of America's most senior cyber warrior comes just days after the US air force disclosed that some 30,000 of its troops had been re-assigned from technical support "to the frontlines of cyber warfare".

The creation of Cyber Command is in response to increasing anxiety over the vulnerability of the US's military and other networks to a cyber attack. James Miller, the deputy under-secretary of defence for policy, has hinted that the US might consider a conventional military response to certain kinds of online attack.

Now the welfare state - cherished by many Europeans as an alternative to what they see as dog-eat-dog American capitalism - is coming under its most serious threat in decades: Europe's sovereign debt crisis. Deep budget cuts are under way across Europe. Although the first round is focused mostly on government payrolls - the least politically explosive target - welfare benefits are looking increasingly vulnerable.

"The current welfare state is unaffordable," said Uri Dadush, director of the Carnegie Endowment's International Economics Program. "The crisis has made the day of reckoning closer by several years in virtually all the industrial countries."

Germany will decide next month just how to cut at least 3 billion euros ($3.75 billion) from the budget. The government is suggesting for the first time that it could make fresh cuts to unemployment benefits that include giving Germans under 50 about 60 percent of their last salary before taxes for up to a year. That benefit itself emerged after cuts to an even more generous package about five years ago.

Mr Salazar is due to visit the disaster site on Monday with other officials. The oil leak began more than a month ago, when a drilling rig operated on behalf of BP exploded, killing 11 people. Tens of thousands of barrels of oil have spewed into the ocean since then from the well's ruptured riser pipe, 1,524 metres (5,000 feet) beneath the surface. The spill has reached Louisiana and is threatening Florida and Cuba.

"If we find they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, we'll push them out of the way appropriately," Mr Salazar told reporters after visiting BP's US headquarters. The BBC's Madeleine Morris in Washington says Mr Salazar's comment is the strongest language yet used by a US official towards BP. Although it is within the government's power to push BP aside, our correspondent says BP is the only organisation with the knowledge to deal with a situation like this at such a depth.

Washington is coming under increasing criticism for its response to the disaster, as well as pressure to assume control from BP.

North Korea's main newspaper called the investigation an "intolerable, grave provocation". The White House endorsed the South's move, and pledged its co-operation "to deter future aggression". Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has urged China to co-operate with the US on North Korea. Mrs Clinton told a US-China summit in Beijing that Pyongyang must be held to account for the attack on the Cheonan.

"We ask North Korea to stop its provocative behaviour... and comply with international law," she added. China is North Korea's closest trading partner and has in the past been reluctant to take tough measures against the communist state. The North depends on South Korea and China for up to 80% of its external trade and 35% of its GDP. In 2009, inter-Korean trade stood at $1.68 billion (1.11 billion pounds) - 13% of the North's GDP.

In a strongly worded televised address, Mr Lee said that the South was forgetting that it shared a border "with one of the most war-mongering nations on Earth. From now on, the Republic of Korea will not tolerate any provocative act by the North and will maintain a principle of proactive deterrence," the president said. "If our territorial waters, airspace or territory are militarily violated, we will immediately exercise our right of self-defence."

Poor loan performance in other sectors also continued to hurt banks, with the total number of loans at least three months past due climbing for the 16th consecutive quarter, FDIC officials said in a briefing on Thursday. "The banking system still has many problems to work through, and we cannot ignore the possibility of more financial market volatility," FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said.

Depending on your viewpoint, it is either a powerful testament to human ingenuity or a terrible example of hubris - and the first step on a very dangerous road. To understand what this development means, we need to discover who the team behind this innovation is. It is led by Craig Venter, the world's greatest scientific provocateur, a 63-year-old Utah-born genius, a Vietnam veteran, billionaire, yachtsman, and an explorer. Above all he is a showman.

A master of self-publicity, he does not do things by halves; he led the private team which competed with scores of publicly funded scientists in the US and UK to 'crack' the human genome by sequencing our DNA. His rapid, innovative approach led to the possibility he would beat the scientific establishment. So, to save face all round, the human genome was presented as a joint achievement. At around the same time, he began talking about making an artificial lifeform in the lab.

Not a Frankenstein's monster, or even a mouse, but a bacterium, one of the simplest living organisms. His blueprint was to be an unassuming and harmless little germ with only 485 genes (humans have around 25,000). Venter talks grandly of a supercharged biotech revolution, with synthetic bacteria designed to produce biofuels, to mine precious metals from rocks and industrial waste, to digest oil slicks and render toxic spills harmless. Scientists could even create bacteria which can produce novel drugs and vaccines, or organisms engineered to live on Mars and other planets.

The potential is huge - but so are the dangers. An artificial species, created in the lab, might not 'obey the rules' of the natural world - after all, every living being on Earth has evolved over three billion years, when a myriad of competing species have had to share the same increasingly crowded environment. It is possible to imagine a synthetic microbe going on the rampage, perhaps wiping out all the world's crop plants or even humanity itself. Synthetic biology also challenges our most cherished notions of what life itself actually is. Non-scientists might not realise that we have, as yet, no proper definition of life.

Of course, this is early days. It is not yet clear if Venter can negotiate the final step - creating a whole cell from scratch, using no bits of existing living organisms at all. His bacterium is likely to be weak and feeble; we are a long way from synthetic super-plagues, and even further from an artificial animal or plant. But it is hard to escape the feeling that a boundary has been crossed. The problem is, it is far from clear where we go from here.

Signs of further disunity in eurozone capitals hammered stock markets, as French finance minister Christine Lagarde openly rejected claims by German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the single currency's continued existence is in danger. Images of a 24-hour general strike in Greece also haunted trading floors, as investors fretted that Athens will fail to push through draconian deficit-cutting plans.

Making matters worse, US figures showed that jobless benefit claims unexpectedly rose last week for the first time since the beginning of April, suggesting America's rebound is stalling. Underlining the grim mood, analysts at Royal Bank of Scotland claimed we may be facing 'Great Depression II' as deflation engulfs global economies. Barclays Capital economist Julian Callow said: 'Europe is pitifully uncoordinated at this particular stage. 'The sad fact is that when Europe needs coordination most, that seems to be when it is lacking.'

However he added that the sovereign debt woes afflicting the euro area are prompting traders in other countries, including the US, to take a hard look at the shattered state of their own government finances. 'The US is also heading to some very high government debt numbers,' said Mr Callow.

'It's like you look through the window and see what's going on in the euro area, but you also see a reflection of yourself.'

Despite all the years of Six Party nuclear disarmament talks, of financial inducements to disarm and, latterly, punitive economic sanctions the international community headed by China and the United States is still no closer to persuading Kim to accept the norms of international behaviour. The evidence presented in Seoul on Thursday, including almost the entire tail section of a CHT-02D torpedo, a variety which the North offers "for export", was as incontrovertible as it is possible to be.

South Korea has already indicated that it plans to refer this extraordinary act of aggression by its estranged, renegade brother to the United Nations Security Council, where it will rightly demand stern and unanimous action against Pyongyang. This is where the international spotlight will fall, with uncomfortable brightness, on China.

However, the early signs of whether China will live up to its new responsibilities as an emerging Great Power are not encouraging. While the rest of the world, including Britain, issued unequivocal condemnation of Pyongyang and called for action against the Kim regime, the best that China's deputy foreign minister Cui Tiankai could manage was that the sinking of the Cheonan was "unfortunate". It was, of course, nothing of the kind. The sinking was a deliberate, pre-planned operation in which a North Korean submarine commander armed a torpedo, plotted a firing solution and then pulled the trigger, killing 46 young sailors in cold blood.

The fact that China appears unable to join the chorus of condemnation for this wanton act of provocation is simply unbecoming a nation that, day by day, demands a greater say in how the world is run. With rights must come responsibilities.

The White House announcement stated that the move is intended to realize Obama's "vision of active US engagement with other nations and international organizations," a goal sometimes pursued, noted National Review Online columnist Brett D Schaefer last Thursday, "even when there is little or no chance that doing so will advance US interests."

The US decision is also meant to support the Alliance goal of "improved understanding and cooperative relations among nations and peoples," the statement said. The group claimed in its first report in 2006 that global tensions were driven primarily by the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The same report referred to "a perception among Muslim societies of unjust aggression stemming from the West" in a discussion relating to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States by the international Al Qaeda terrorist group.

Since Obama took office a year ago, he has worked hard to reach out to the Islamic community of nations in a series of gestures that make it clear he is bending over backwards to strengthen ties with the Muslim world. Since his speech from Cairo last June, Obama has reached out to Iran and Syria, restoring full diplomatic relations with Damascus and returning an ambassador to the Syrian capital. The US has also joined the anti-Israel UN Human Rights Commission. Both these moves are reversals of prior Bush administration decisions.

An official report, carried out by South Korean investigators together with teams from the United States, Britain, Australia and Sweden, said the evidence pointed "overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine." It added: "There is no other plausible explanation." South Korea vowed "resolute countermeasures" against the North and is likely to appeal to the United Nations for further sanctions on the rogue state.

Barack Obama immediately offered his "strong and unequivocal" support to Lee Myung-bak, his South Korean counterpart. "This attack constitutes a challenge to international peace and security," the White House said. Britain, Japan and Australia all joined the chorus of condemnation. William Hague, the British Foreign secretary, said North Korea had a "total indifference to human life and international obligations". He said Britain was working on an "appropriate multilateral response to this callous act".

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said: "This act of aggression is one more instance of North Korea's unacceptable behaviour and defiance of international law... Such unacceptable behaviour only deepens North Korea's isolation." He said the attack "constitutes a challenge to international peace and security".

However, North Korea strongly denied responsibility for the attack, calling the investigation a "fabrication orchestrated by a group of traitors". It said it would "promptly" react to any retaliation and further sanctions with "various forms of tough measures including an all-out war". In recent weeks, North Korea has begun massing more troops on the border with the South.

On arrival, it will raise the number of US carriers off Iranian shores to two. Up until now, President Barack Obama kept just one aircraft carrier stationed off the coast of Iran, the USS Dwight D Eisenhower in the Arabian Sea, in pursuit of his policy of diplomatic engagement with Tehran. For the first time, too, the US force opposite Iran will be joined by a German warship, the frigate FGS Hessen, operating under American command.

The USS Truman is just the first element of the new buildup of US resources around Iran. It will take place over the next three months, reaching peak level in late July and early August. By then, the Pentagon plans to have at least 4 or 5 US aircraft carriers visible from Iranian shores.

In its big naval exercise last week, Iran exhibited the Velayat 89 long-range missile for striking US aircraft carriers and Israel warships from Iranian submarines.